Nevzat Akpınar, who taught himself to play the Turkish stringed instrument Bağlama, completed master classes with the legendary singer and Bağlama virtuoso Talip Özkan in Paris in the 1980s. This was followed by tone-setting lessons and instrumental studies with Tayfun Erdem and piano lessons with Henning Schmiedt. In 2002 he completed his studies in Comparative Musicology (ethnomusicology) and Turkology at the Freie University of Berlin.
He participated in various projects as a Bağlama player, including the European tour of Mikis Theodorakis and Zülfü Livaneli, reading evenings with Gisela Kraft, and the performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail directed by Georg Tabori. In 2009, Akkiraz Müzik (Istanbul) released his solo CD On Hybrid Ways – exclusively with original compositions for Bağlama. With his Greek-German rembetiko band Zotos Compania he released two albums and composed solo pieces for Bağlama based on Turkish poems and chamber music. Additonally, he performed his project Johann Dede, a piece for string orchestra, with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra at the Philharmonie. In 2007, he gave a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall with Nevzat Akpınar Ensemble as part of the Berlin in Lights Festival. Furthermore, he composed the music for the play Perikizi at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse (2011), as well as the music for other dance theater plays such as Zeybreak, Hüzün‘ Scha’irlie-this is not a Chaplin and Anadolu Break by Kadir Amigo Memiş. Besides the concert with Merve Akyildiz (2024) he performed at the Ballhaus Naunystraße at the events Nevzat Akpinar and Haydar Kutluer (2017, 2020) and Nevzat Akpınar & friends (2023).